Isaak Dunayevsky

Biography

Isaak Osipovich Dunayevsky (Russian: Исаак Осипович Дунаевский ; also transliterated as Dunaevski or Dunaevskiy; 30 January [O.S. 18 January] 1900 – 25 July 1955) was a Soviet film composer and conductor of the 1930s and 1940s, who composed music for operetta and film comedies, frequently working with the film director Grigori Aleksandrov.

Biography

Dunayevsky was born to a Jewish family in Lokhvytsia in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire (now Myrhorod Raion, Poltava Oblast, Ukraine) in 1900. He studied at the Kharkiv Musical School in 1910 where he studied violin under Konstanty Gorski and Joseph Achron. During this period he started to study the theory of music under Semyon Bogatyrev (1890–1960). He graduated in 1919 from the Kharkiv National Kotlyarevsky University of Arts. At first he was a violinist, the leader of the orchestra in Kharkov. Then he started a conducting career. In 1924 he went to Moscow to run the Theatre Hermitage. In 1929 he worked for the first time for a music hall ("To the icy place") with the Moscow music hall and began collaborating with Leonid Utesov. Later, he worked in Leningrad (1929–1941) as a director and conductor of the Saint Petersburg Music Hall (1929–34), and then moved to Moscow to work on his own operettas and film music.
Dunayevsky wrote 14 operettas, 3 ballets, 3 cantatas, 80 choruses, 80 songs and romances, music for 88 plays and 42 films, 43 compositions for light music orchestra and 12 for jazz orchestra, 17 melodeclamations, 52 compositions for symphony orchestra and 47 piano compositions and a string quartet. Among other works, he set to music Mikhail Svetlov's ‘Song of Kakhovka’, written in 1935, which became extremely popular.
He was one of the first composers in the Soviet Union to start using jazz. He wrote the music for three of the most important films of the pre-war Stalinist era, Jolly Fellows, Circus and the film said to be Stalin's favorite film Volga-Volga, all directed by Grigori Aleksandrov.
In a reply to the British book The World of Music, he listed the following as his chief works: The Golden Valley operetta (1937), The Free Wind operetta (1947), and music to the films Circus (1935) and The Kuban Cossacks (1949).
He died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1955. His last piece, the operetta White Acacia (1955), was left unfinished at his death. It was completed by Kirill Molchanov and staged on 15 November 1955, in Moscow.
A previously unknown opera libretto Rachel (1943) by Mikhail Bulgakov, was later found in his archive. The libretto was based on Guy de Maupassant's Mademoiselle Fifi and was published in a book by Naum Shafer (see references and links below).
A book of his essays and memoirs was published in 1961.

Honors

Dunayevsky was named a People's Artist of the RSFSR in 1950. He was twice awarded the Stalin Prize (1941, 1951) and received two orders and many medals (including Order of the Red Banner of Labour, Order of the Red Star, and Order of the Badge of Honour).
The asteroid (4306) Dunayevsky is named in his honour.

Family

His brother Semyon (1906–1986) was a conductor; another brother, Zinovy (1908–1981), was a composer.
Dunayevsky was married once. He had a son Yevgeny (b. 1932) by his wife Zinaida Sudeikina, and another son Maksim (b. 1945) by his lover, the ballerina Zoya Pashkova (1922—30.01.1991). Maksim is also a well-known composer.
The American journalist Vladislav Davidzon is a descendent of the composer.
The American drag performer Plane Jane (Andrew Dunayevskiy), who appeared on Season 16 of RuPaul's Drag Race, is a distant relative of Dunayevsky.